ISSUE #11 – ECONOMY

Framed as inescapable, indescribable, uncontrollable and essential, economies are everywhere. Oppressive and enabling, lucrative and undervalued, there are economies that trade our emotional labour, desires, love, fertility, time, minds, queerness, politics and clicks. There are economies that we can control and that control us, and those that we can subvert to serve our collectives. A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound, in a conversation with a cat, an app-enabled journey through a rainy Shanghai night, in the margins between intimacy and power, in the kitchen, with your record collection, under the tip of the iceberg, at the foot of a tower she built, dancing at the lesbian bar.

ISSUE #10 – FUTURE

We want a future outside of straight time. A future in which all our friends and lovers and their lovers are coming over for dinner around a table we built together. We want a future that is fair, fun, furry, fabulous, fierce, free and not fucked up. We want futures.

ISSUE #9 – DANCE AND DANCING

It has been a longstanding wish to expand Girls Like Us beyond the editorial team, to use this platform for different voices and disciplines and to experiment with pushing the publication to another plateau. Horizontally — not vertically. When New York-based artist and writer Emma Hedditch approached us in fall of 2016 to work together on a special issue themed around DANCE & DANCING, the opportunity for this expansion arose. DANCE AND DANCING explores the New York dance scene – past, present and future.

ISSUE #8 – FAMILY

As you know, we have a soft spot for collectives, collaborations, friendships and support structures. People doing things with other people: loving, working, organizing, living. These strategies for surviving together form an underlying thread throughout all our issues. This time we wanted to look more closely at one way of naming these friendly constellations: FAMILY.

ISSUE #7 – BODY

120 pages exploring the body and bodies, inside out and outside in. Bodies that dance and move. Bodies making waves. Body double. Bodies at work and working with the body. Using the body as an instrument. The body as medium and massage of touch and being touched. The single, singular body as the very basis for a ‘we’.

ISSUE #6 – SECRETS

A secret can be a private space for self-creation – or a shared site of pleasure.

We explore secrets in a plethora of forms and contexts. From layered accounts of mediaeval ecstasy to the unexplored sensory experience of smell. From camouflaged play to queer readings of astrological charts and the hidden history of house music. From a very analog point of view to the outskirts of the internet.

ISSUE #5 – PLAY

In a world with too many choices and too little time to explore, play is an excellent strategy. Objects, roles, bodies, settings – anything can be transformed in play. Playing across time, space, architecture, beds, houses, lives, papers. Suddenly a chair is a plane is a stroy is an animal is an avatar is a new reality. Making up worlds, filming them. Surfing warm and cold waves. Playing with identities. Playing en masse. Playing to be free.

ISSUE #4 – WORK

These days, if you call someone to go for a drink or a walk in the park, the obvious answer is: 'Sorry, I'm too busy'. Too busy with what? What do you do all day in your studio or office, bar or dancefloor, spending precious time on 'work'? And what makes it different from labouring? Do we slave for money – or no money – building on a system that is doomed to collapse? Or do we build on a new future where work and play are equal? When we work on our own initiatives and with a self-generated goal, would that still be called work? In this issue: other voices, other routes.

ISSUE #6 – SECRETS

A secret can be a private space for self-creation – or a shared site of pleasure.

We explore secrets in a plethora of forms and contexts. From layered accounts of mediaeval ecstasy to the unexplored sensory experience of smell. From camouflaged play to queer readings of astrological charts and the hidden history of house music. From a very analog point of view to the outskirts of the internet.

Interviews with art critic Linda Yablonsky, scent researcher Sissel Tolaas and artist Juliana Huxtable. Artwork by Melissa Gordon, Lotte Reimann and Sara Van der Heide. Other people featured are a.o. filmmaker Chloé Robichaud, astrologist Rhea Wolf and singer Zhala Rifat, next to a hidden correspondence between writers Carson McCullers and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a registry of pseudonyms by Riet Wijnen and much more.